Pain Research Center

The Pain Research Center brings an interdisciplinary approach to the study of what pain is and how we treat it. We are clinical care providers, psychologists, social scientists, basic scientists, and an applied statistician, united by a belief that no single perspective has a clear view of pain and what it does to us.

Mission

The overall mission of the center is to investigate the perception, causes, and consequences of pain. We take a broad view of this mission. Pain is more than signals traveling this way and that through the body. The onslaught and persistence of pain depend on psychology, personal history and the medical, social and cultural environment. Though we share a common nervous system infrastructure, we experience pain as unique individuals.

At the Pain Research Center, we study underlying scientific mechanisms against the ever-present background of individual differences that modulate these mechanisms—the person and the pain. It’s not possible to understand one without the other.